‘Married… with Children’ on Hulu: How a Boycott Backfired and Made Fox’s First Sitcom a Hit

Today’s TV viewers, they don’t know nothing about controversy. Roseanne Barr aside, the major networks are filled with quirky family comedies that make you think and then make you laugh, all responsibly. When it comes to good old-fashioned controversial comedy, no modern show comes close to the raunch and debauchery of Married… with Children.

If you’ve come of age during the streaming era, you may not know what all the fuss was about when Married… with Children debuted back in 1987. Now that all 11 seasons of the show are streaming on Hulu, you can go back and see if the show’s comedy has gone sour–well, sour-er. The show’s whole deal way back when was being the sour, scummy spin on the stale family sitcom. It debuted on April 5, 1987, back when shows like Growing Pains, Family Ties, and Who’s the Boss? were bringing gentle laughter into living rooms every week.

Married… with Children was a disruptor. Starring Ed O’Neill (Modern Family) and Katey Sagal (Sons of Anarchy, Futurama) as the misanthropic Al Bundy and the fabulously lazy Peggy Bundy, the show followed the lowbrow trials and tribulations of family life in the Chicago suburbs. There was no way Married… with Children, a show where the kids (Christina Applegate’s Kelly and David Faustino’s Bud) were aggressively ditzy and/or horny, would have ever fit in on any major network’s lineup. That’s why it fit right in on the disruptor network, Fox.

Fox was an edgy upstart 30 years ago. It debuted in the fall of 1986 with one major program, a late-night talk show hosted by Joan Rivers. A few months later in the spring of 1987, Fox made a move for primetime by launching Married… with Children and the sketch program The Tracey Ullman Show. The first two seasons of Married… with Children flew under the radar, partly because Fox was still not available in a lot of the country. But all that changed with the show’s third season, a season so controversial that it would put MWC on the grease-stained, heavily-creased map.

Photo: Everett Collection

In late 1988, Married… with Children writers Sandy Sprung and Marcy Vosburgh turned in a script titled “A Period Piece.” In the episode, the ladies crash a dudes-only fishing trip and then ruin it when they all get their periods at once. Comedy! For comparison, a Growing Pains episode from around that time dealt with Ben’s first kiss. The censors were not too thrilled with “A Period Piece,” causing the episode to be delayed while the show tried to get it ready to air. One major change: the episode was re-titled “The Camping Show,” even though MWC viewers never saw the titles of episodes.

But the internal drama surrounding “The Camping Show” would be nothing compared to the external drama surrounding the January 1989 episode “Her Cups Runneth Over.” In it, Al tracks down a birthday gift for Peg: her favorite, recently-discontinued bra. That synopsis sounds mild, but the episode itself contained visuals of an old man wearing women’s lingerie, a gay man in a tiara, a fetish mannequin,, and a bare-chested woman covering her boobs with her arms. When Terry Rakolta, a mormon homemaker from Michigan, saw what her kids were watching, she was not happy. Also, fun fact about Terry Rakolta: her sister was once married to Mitt Romney’s brother!

Anyway, Rakolta went to war with Married… with Children, writing letters to dozens of their sponsors and going on a talk show tour, criticizing the show nonstop. When advertisers started to pull out, Fox had to take Rakolta’s censorship campaign seriously. They responded by bumping Married… with Children from 8:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Fox had previously aired their controversial flagship show during what was unofficially referred to as the family viewing hour. Shows that aired between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. were supposed to be fun for the whole family, and Fox putting MWC in that hour was viewed as a cheeky middle-finger to norms. When Rakolta complained and advertisers started to notice, they blinked and pushed MWC to the later time, and they even started to tone down the content.

But the decision to tone things down wasn’t made in time to affect a fast-approaching episode. The Season 3 episode “I’ll See You In Court” was scheduled to air just a month after “Her Cups Runneth Over,” the episode that incited a boycott. Fox felt that “I’ll See You In Court” was potentially even worse. They pulled the episode completely, skipping it and moving on to the next one.

Photo: Everett Collection

Here’s where Rakolta’s plan backfired: yeah, Married… with Children lost a few advertisers and its time slot, but it won a whole lot of free publicity–publicity well beyond what the fledgling Fox network managed to muster during the show’s first two seasons. People started tuning in every week, and the show jumped from being #116 in the year-end ratings to #48 by the end of the 1988-1989 season. On top of that, almost all of the advertisers came back within a year.

For 13 years, though, Rakolta could claim getting “I’ll See You In Court” pulled permanently as a victory. And then in 2002, the episode aired as a special on Fox’s cable counterpart FX. In “I’ll See You In Court,” the Bundys try to spice things up by having sex somewhere outside their home, like a motel. Then they find out that their lovemaking was videotaped, and they sue the motel. Top it all off, the episode ends with Al and Peg going at it on the judge’s bench… and a courtroom camera recording it. Back when the MWC producers tried to get the episode past Fox, the censors gave it around 3-5 times more notes than usual. A few changes were made, but the MWC team wouldn’t budge on around a dozen since making those changes would cause the episode to fall apart. Fast-forward to 2002, 5 years after the show went off the air, and “I’ll See You In Court” was finally fit to air (albeit with a few line edits).

Now, 31 years after it debuted, you can finally stream all of Married… with Children in a vacuum, removed from the boycotts and talk show debates and scandals. But looking back on the whirlwind of filth this show kicked up between 1988 and 1989, don’t you kinda wanna stream it while knowing all this naughty stuff?